She Matters (18 page)

Rachel gaped at the opulence I was used to as we entered the house, thin gray handle on the screen door a known happiness in my fingers. We came into the lemon-oiled dining room, delicately crammed with grandfather clock, nineteenth-century breakfront, Windsor chairs. Rachel touched the brass candelabras fit with white-wicked ivory tapers, turned the cut-crystal decanters my grandmother had been handed by her decorator. In silver dishes on the sideboard, mussel shells showed their mother-of-pearl and pinecones gave off their ancient air. We both loved old-fashioned beauty. We both loved the enormous pink roses woven into the black carpet. Rachel asked, What's this, what did I think of the ornate barometer, the antique sextant, the series of oil portraits? “Are these your relatives?” They weren't, but they fit the house.

On the dunes, wind pounding us, the gray sea stretching out, she let her voice grow loud, surprised at herself, then breathless back in the car. And she loved the late-afternoon return to the enclosure of the guest bedroom, where I'd given her the four-poster bed, the pink coverlet and pink pillowcases, silky with three decades' care. Happiness became her, although it did not seem to come easily. We made fires, we made hot milk with nutmeg, added teaspoons of Kahlúa as if we were breaking rules. She thanked me for weeks after we got back to school.

As if flirting, I coaxed her closer, and she didn't resist or disapprove, granting me room to behave as I liked. We couldn't have been more different. I admired her ladylike deliberations and composure, the faux-Victorian drop earrings, the impeccable white of her blouse, and she seemed to enjoy my assault on her primness, as I flaunted a wickedness she wouldn't allow herself. I did or did not write my papers, didn't turn things in on time, skipped consecutive days of physics class. I was dating Jason, a happy, vigorous sort of business. We made love everywhere, in the back office of the radio station, in the basement of the library, met at lunchtime in his central-campus room, in my room after midnight. I told details to Rachel, scandalizing her, thinking vulgar delight was a tonic. She could use frankness! As we passed the library, for instance, I'd give it an exaggerated glance, and she'd stammer, crack up. “I can't believe you, Susanna. On the
floor
?” I wanted a trade. Come out with your mysteries, I thought, waited. Now tell
me.
I told her of the affair in high school with my married teacher. Now what about
you
? I wanted to know what made her go quiet, what accounted for the tics. But the more I revealed, the sharper, cruder, worse behaved I was, the more detailed her questions of me. I flourished with her interest and kept talking, as she retreated further, donning that fine invisible mesh of the attentive observer. Whatever it was I wanted of Rachel she could not release. Not every friend has to say everything, know everything, I told myself. I calmed. What we did best together was give Susanna the stage she craved. Rachel did not fight me for the spotlight.

To escape phys ed, I'd signed up for ballroom dance, and I convinced Rachel to join me. “You can be the girl,” I promised. I grabbed around her waist. She gave in, pulling back her body, also smiling at my plea. “Okay, okay.” We surprised ourselves that we were good at this, because I was not graceful and she wasn't
athletic, but in each other's arms, crucial complement, we were terrific. The opening bars of “In the Mood” made their permanent groove in my brain, carved muscle memory, and I still feel my fingers curve around Rachel's hand as she set it in mine. The third week the teacher told everyone else, “Watch
them
.” We grinned, arms lifted, and ate up the room with our fox-trot, then our waltz.

• • •

For Thanksgiving, Rachel took me home to Connecticut; my Honda, my gunned gear shifts, her hand rising to the dash now and then. We played a Woody Allen stand-up cassette until we were gasping, I almost had to pull over. I'd never felt my body so fully occupied by free delight and hilarity. I talked about Jason, our reflexive breakups and predictable reunions. She kept her eye on the wheel, on the road. Let her watch, I thought. Let's see what she does with recklessness. She didn't say much about her parents, except biography. She named their hometowns, her father's enlistment dates, kept herself out of the way, a narrator detached. When I talked about my parents—the brief mention of my father, the marathon confusions of my mother—I rolled out whole stories, contempt and resigned comedy my high-wire act over more conflicted emotion.

As we arrived, her mother emerged to greet us in the driveway. The house stood over us. I'd been unaware of suburbs, the shush and halt, the way everything was settled by legible street signs. Her mother took us through the garage, into the hallway that led to the kitchen. We were to do nothing, she was saying, except recover from our hard work. I loved the whiff of lawn mower fuel, and chicken roasting this early in the afternoon. This was a foundation, this was
a house,
with a mailbox and a mat that curled around the base of the toilet and a bird feeder out the kitchen window.
I inspected it all, an exultant anthropologist. There was a sewing room and a screened-in porch. The front doorbell, which I tried, went
ding dong
. After supper her father sat in the TV room, and I went in and asked him to show me the old army pictures and Rachel's baby pictures. I was excellent with parents. Rachel stayed at the table, pulling at her strands. “Wait'll you see this,” he said, energized, hunting through a cabinet. He put a home movie in the VCR, fussing with the controls and his reading glasses, and I called to her, “Look at your tiny red barrettes, I remember those!” She wouldn't come, I could not involve her.

At night I tossed off sweater and T-shirt, stood, upper half naked, rummaged for my pajamas, and Rachel reddened and turned away. She put a Lanz nightgown over her head, let it drop from her shoulders, and slipped her clothes off beneath the flannel, a trick of modesty I'd never seen, even at boarding school. In her bed, we whispered, still a habit from the time not so long ago of sleepovers, voicing the hopes darkness invited. Before we were up in the morning, I heard a car pull in, the trunk thump shut, a screen door open and spring back. Her mother called to us, “Girls!” and I got right up and went down to see what was happening in the kitchen. Bags of groceries brimmed on the floor by the fridge. Her mother chopped carrots and red onions into tiny dice. She whipped them with a strong arm into the cream cheese for our bagels, which she'd sliced and toasted. She set one before me as I slid into a chair. Rachel came down later, fully dressed, and didn't eat.

We didn't leave for walks or shopping. We stayed in the house and let it govern us. Hour after hour in the TV room, “Funny Girl” and “Annie Hall.” I loved the green- and gold-flocked wallpaper along the stairs, the comfortable, sloppy kitchen with the stacks of Entenmann's boxes on the crowded counter. The sounds
of her mother's business seemed to inhabit each room, bills being ripped open, drawers closed, the radio dial adjusted. What was that, I thought, watching every move. What does that do? Her mother, as she talked to me of redheaded cousins and recent bar mitzvahs, washed onion skins down the disposal, flipping a switch, not even looking. Sunday I was depressed to leave, to resume the serious chore of study, and I held on to Rachel's mother, who insisted I come back; and I would come back many times in the next five years. Rachel kept her distance, coat buttoned and messenger bag held close. She accepted quick pecks from her parents. Once in the car, she said, “They love you.” I thought she was talking about me, my success, but she meant them, what they required. She was inspecting some mechanism, trying to understand them, and I waited, but she didn't say more.

• • •

In the spring, my mother brought her new boyfriend to Boston for the weekend. “He wants to meet you!” she said, and I knew he'd heard the same. My mother liked to promote her plans before anyone involved had reviewed them. When I asked her to slow down, or when I said, “Really? He really wants to come to Boston?” she'd say, “You're going to adore him, I know it.” I hated the sense of being molded for her uses, set up for her parade. The boyfriend was rich, so they stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, glamour on the Common. Just a few towns apart, my mother and I could share the instant thought. Mostly, we spent the time together, but when I wasn't with her, she'd phone—The girl on the local news, look at her teeth; the color today of the Charles River, what do you think? Call me back. In a weekend, I learned the Ritz phone number and the name of each polite concierge who answered and connected me to her suite.

I asked Rachel, patient and keen to observe, if she'd come to brunch on Sunday, meet my bubbling mother of the legendary misbehaviors. In the tranquility of the elevator we looked around—this other Boston, old elegance, how unlike our functional campus, our cheaply built student housing. Down the serene hall we found my mother's door ajar, her voice audible, that fake-sexy whisper for the room service waiter or someone on the phone. It didn't matter who, boyfriend, sister, hotel manager. “Sue's here!” she said and hung up. I moved into her outstretched arms. Her overdone affection was meant to impress my friend, initiate her. Rachel swayed by the door, unwilling or uncomfortable to step onto the wide-open of the carpet, as my mother flung greeting and inquiry at her. Rachel gave shy answers, lowered her head, and her hair fell forward.

Maybe the rich boyfriend, who would eventually marry my mother and move her to Dubai, dined with us in the hotel's restaurant, but I don't remember him that weekend. After brunch, where my mother had ordered fresh-squeezed orange juice for all before we'd been handed the menus, we returned upstairs with her—she was big on being escorted, and she'd probably promised me some money. I was dying to review her with Rachel, let another's perspective calm me, organize me. My mother, in the open-doored bathroom, peed, flushed, still asking questions of Rachel and interrupting herself as she used the sink. She emerged with a wooden hanger, hotel robe trailing from it. The breast pocket, embroidered
Ritz-Carlton
with the logo of a lion's head, made an electric impression of blue against the bleached toweling. “Feel this, Sue, come on.” She lifted my hand and stroked it over the terry cloth. Rachel watched me surrender. “Heaven, isn't it!” said my mother. She offered Rachel a sleeve and said, “Feel,” which Rachel did. Anyone instructed by my mother obeyed. “Rachel's
got great hair, doesn't she, Sue? You've got
great
hair, Rachel. You know that, don't you?” She pulled at my satchel. “Here, open up.” She bundled the robe and shoved it into my bag. “What about Rachel? Rachel, love, do you need a robe?” She went to the closet, scanned the floor. “We have two? Yes! And a shopping bag!” Rachel looked at me, checking how to play the game, or if this was a game. “I'm okay,” she said. My mother skipped to the bed, grabbed the phone, was insisting to Housekeeping that the suite had
only one robe
and she expected another
right away
. I shrugged. I was used to it; now you've met my family. On the way home, Rachel said, laughing, “I can't believe you just stole a robe from a hotel.” “They can afford it,” I said, pleased by conspiracy with my truant mother, a way of being that was as natural and expected for me as the morning bagels and special cream cheese in Rachel's Connecticut. From time to time Rachel would ask if I still had the robe, and I said, “Of course.” (It was very well made.) I wore it every night for years, enjoyed its pilfered luxury until it fell apart. That's how Rachel knew my mother, prancing thief, irresistible, delinquent fairy godmother. Rachel didn't see how weary I was of the dedicated, upbeat badness, of the permission I was always asked to bestow, of the temporary luxuries that were never earned. I didn't know I was tired of faking.

• • •

That summer I moved into Esther's apartment, which was above Rachel's, the gray house a mile from campus. Rachel, who had graduated, lived with a chemistry student from Colombia who was engaged and a young chef apprenticing in Boston. Every weekday morning Rachel went into the city, temping at design firms and PR agencies.
Nearby
was the right proximity for us. I loved Rachel's antidote to my life's early disorder, but her carefulness, those tiny
perfume bottles she kept lined up, her white linen runners embroidered with little violets atop her dresser—it could be too much for me, airless.

Rachel laughed at her preferences and idiosyncrasies, a sign of health. She liked being teased, let me. She dated no one, never even looked—another idiosyncrasy? She blushed over Prince when we saw
Purple Rain
at the second-run theater, a heat in spite of herself. It seemed there had been someone, one camp summer, some kissing, but she said only enough to conjure the faintest sort of disappointment. I didn't know—and by now she was one of my closest, most enthusiastic confidantes—if she was a virgin, such a key topic, the words
virgin
or
virginity
most of us managed to fit into every conversation. She modeled modesty. I threw myself into the outrageous orgy of Jason, not caring why Rachel let me keep talking about him.

• • •

For fifteen years Rachel and I went deep with our mutual ways of seeing and reading, mutual comic pleasures, love of art, Italy, all that, and we laughed so hard, with love, at our stark differences. After my graduation, we'd never shared a city again—I in London, she in LA; I in LA, she in St. Paul—but if we found ourselves in New York, a weekend coincidence, we'd catch up at top speed over rushed coffee and I'd come away revitalized by forgotten happinesses, by being known and unconditionally loved. Our voices lapsed into younger, sweeter versions. I liked who I was with her, who she let me be, looser, giddier, indulged. We corresponded with devotion, letters, frequent calls—she always sent antique cards and small meticulously packaged presents for birthdays, new homes, episodes of turmoil—lipstick in a shade I liked, thoughtful that way. I counted on how she held me in her heart.